As I have shared, I like music quite a bit. While not being a skilled musician, I like all genres of music and have fun creating playlists.
Beats per minute (BPM) is an objective measure of how fast a song is playing. Some are slow like a romantic ballad, others have some energy leading all the way up to songs that are made for you to dance at a fast pace.
BPM is listed as 75 or 93 or 107 or 118 or 135. When you look at these numbers, they really don’t mean much on the surface. Yet they are facts. A song has so many beats per minute.
What I found as I started to catalog the BPMs of songs, is that I didn’t have a feel for how fast a 93 BPM song really was or can you dance to a song that has a 107 BPM. You see, when you look at facts there is no context.
You need context to help make informed decisions based on facts. This is true of any fact. And especially when you are comparing numbers, To gain context, many times, demands comparisons.
The only way I could gain context around BPMs was to listen to songs next to each other that had different BPMs. It was hard to tell the difference between a 93 BPM and a 95 BPM song. But it was very helpful to listen to the 93 BPM song next to a 75 BPM song and a 107 BPM song. Over time, this context & understanding will become intuitive the more I do this.
Whatever facts you are presented, be it your A1C sugar level or your blood pressure as examples, you need to compare the value against others to really understand what they mean. What facts are important and what facts are just noise and have no real value is key.
Compared to what? This is a great tool for gaining context around numbers that are presented as facts. The important thing is to slow down enough, when hearing facts, to ask this question before forming your opinion.